Which Civilization is the least dumbed-down?

[Johannes]

Yeah, everyone knows you can only destroy artillery while it's shelling you... Of course 1 spearman can protect 1000 archers from an army on horseback coming from all sides.

See the problem? The artillery is well protected while not attacking, and vulnerable when attacking. That's totally backward. An army using its artillery to shell you doesn't make them more vulnerable.

It's fine, it's a gameplay mechanic for balance. But it's nonsense.

The spearman can't protect the archers forever, if theres enough cavalry it'll get whittled down soon enough. The artillery part is ok too, holding the guns in the army camp is easily defended, taking them out on the field risks losing them. It's not the individual attacks of individual units in a large army v army confrontation that must make sense logically, but the overall result - at the end you look at it, there was a battle where all these units participated, and took these casualties.

 

[oscar]

realism invictus has "supply": a tile can support only x number of units, more than that and all of them get penalties, but every unit gives a bonus to the whole stack (melee add strength, archers first strike...) so that having a mixed stack is often preferable.
i should replay it to check if a stack of 200 archers can instakill anything despite low supply.

RI also generally makes units more hammer expensive so a 'doomstack' is about 8-16 units instead of 50 (smaller doesn't take advantage of mixed stack bonuses, too big gets the under-supplied penalty). I also like the ability to produce crappy irregular troops from food alone to represent populous agrarian but unindustrialised civilisations still being able to field large (albeit unimpressive) forces.

 

[Luzur]

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

damn, that's a small map. bad times.